The Big & Dandy Psychedelic Books Thread
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Amberthefrog
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qft
jam uh weezy
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I'm reading Island right now. It's great. It hasn't really got into psychedelic usage so far, save for one mention of a text on 'hallucinogenic mushrooms'. But it really touches on some things I've been pondering.
I'm enjoying the kind-of social commentary the stories' characters discuss about society and spiritual fraudulence/'gurus'.
Read Brave New World back in highschool, it's a good book too. I can see how the two books sort of contrast themselves.
I plan on reading DOP next.
I'm enjoying the kind-of social commentary the stories' characters discuss about society and spiritual fraudulence/'gurus'.
Read Brave New World back in highschool, it's a good book too. I can see how the two books sort of contrast themselves.
I plan on reading DOP next.
Teotzlcoatl
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doors of perception
Tunnelfission
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Beautiful "Is-ness"
Just got perennial philosophy, and i've read the doors of percetion, but it's been a couple years.
Just got perennial philosophy, and i've read the doors of percetion, but it's been a couple years.
Divine Moments
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I loved Brave New World, but wasn't quite as keen on Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell. Whilst they were definitely interesting reads, I don't agree with some of what he proposes in them. Island's still on my list so I can't really help you there ![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
tylerwashere
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Doors of perception is a little slow, but it is really interesting if you have an interest in psychs (peyote and mescaline specifically) and deep thought and revelations. Brave new world is alot more interesting if you're looking for fiction book instead.
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Teotzlcoatl
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o goodness, i wish y'all'd stop doing that
Teotzlcoatl
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haha ok
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Alex Grey- The Mission of Art. Really interesting look into the mystical and spiritual side of (mainly) visual art. His artwork is, of course, beautiful, but he discusses a lot of the more subtle idea's surrounding art- with a kind of Buddhist/Zen perspective. And of course a psychedelic side. Its certainly got me looking at various paintings (Van Gogh "Starry Night", Jackson Pollock, Kandinsky etc.) and seeing more elements in them. Highly recommeneded read
Delta-9-THC
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You can find pretty much any book on amazon.
Cheshire Squirrel
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An excellent book so far--I've only read half--with a nice personal touch and interesting facts. Fairly scientific in its foundations, and its theories are a tad controversial yet gripping. A book I'd suggest to anyone with psychedelic interests, especially DMT.
DwayneHoover
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William burroughs - the western lands
"I want to reach the Western Lands - right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It's a frozen sewer. All the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands. Let it flow! How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he "wants." You have to be in Hell to see Heaven. Glimpses from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy, a joy as old as suffering and despair."(257-258)
William Burroughs.
The Western Lands.
Oh my fucking god.
Way way better than that Naked Lunch silliness.
His last book and magnum opus... very very mind expanding, in a way of explaining in a pithy down to earth manner whole other ways of viewing understanding and handling the spacetime continuum and our human experience within it. Some of the language is just spectacular.
Look it up on Amazon.
Actually it is a trilogy... reading first two does deepen The Western Lands, but there is enough in the latter that you can read it by itself. But do try to read all 3. If it becomes not to your liking, scrap the first two and jump right to The Western Lands. The page just explodes with asonishingly original teaching thoughts and images... makes you think "Burroughs was a truly wise and brilliant man".
The reviewer quoted below mentions a great sadness, but I also felt a brilliant scintillating joy and hope for the POSSIBILITIES that the very miraculous existence of mind implies, which trumps and transcends all and and all depressing contents of our specific individual lives. He shows you ways of looking at all this that you will be VERY GRATEFUL to have been granted by the author.
"Product Description
Burroughs's eagerly awaited final novel in the trilogy begun with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads is a profound, revealing, and often astonishing meditation on mortality, loneliness, nuclear peril, and the inextinguishable hope for life after death."
Burroughs's best work. Period., July 17, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Western Lands (Paperback)
The Western Lands has all the scatter-brained and scatological charm that any of WSB's finest portrays, but not only is this particular story, the third installment of the Cities of the Red Night trilogy, form at its best, the content transcends anything else he's written. In his old age, WSB had an incredible emotional sadness about him, and this novel, which becomes semi-autobiographical at its end, leaves you profoundly touched in a way Naked Lunch never did and few novels ever can. The whole thing is worth reading if nothing else for the Wishing Box chapter at the work's conclusion.
"From Publishers Weekly
The trilogy that began with Cities of the Red Night and continued with The Place of Dead Roads is completed here, and the result is a divine comedy," wrote PW of this "remarkable achievement," concerning the search for eternal rest that is symbolized by the Western Lands of Egyptian mythology. "
"From Library Journal
This novel concludes the trilogy begun in Cities of the Red Night ( LJ 11/15/80) and The Place of the Dead Roads ( LJ 2/1/84). The title refers to the place in ancient Egyptian mythology where souls journeyed in search of immortality. Characters from Burroughs's earlier works reappear; the dreamlike prosestylistically a mixture of straight-forward and surrealistic narrative, with sparse use of the cut-up method Burroughs developed with the late Brion Gysinabounds with images of violent homosexuality, man-eating insects, and rancid decay as Burroughs explores such themes as addiction, mortality, the survival of the species, and the quest for eternal life. Essential for all serious literature collections. William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY"
By In One Ear Out Your Mother (Spotswood, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Western Lands (Paperback)
Refusing to designate the human as a unitary enitity, Burroughs compels us to schizophrenize our psychic lives via the Egyptian inspiration that we have Seven Souls, representing the miscellany of psychic forces which vie for possession of the egoistic "I" (in the novel, Mr. Eight-Ball). *Quien es?* [Who's there?] "There is intrigue among the souls, and treachery. No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls"(6). Once the reader has mastered this logic of multiplicity, he is ready for Burroughs's second novelistic reality-engine, his attempt to write a new Book of the Dead, an effort to alert the reader of his/her submissive, zombie-like role in the interstices of turn-of-the-century capitalist subjectivity, to grant us the psychic weapons to wage war on the necromantic cultural artifacts which surround us and construct us; a quest to reposition oneself in disjunction with these seven spirits of control and subjugation. The paradise of the Western Lands can only be viewed from the sunken regions of the Land of the Dead, the *kenoma* or cosmological emptiness within which we wander. Those readers who can survive the brutal exigencies of the pilgrim's death-march will realize with Burroughs that Immortality is, in all finality, coextensive with Purpose and Function, a becoming-Active which precedes the constitution of the ego and will survive that ego's demise. The Western Lands will always exist as that unreachable horizon of eternal sanctity and gratification, a Lie against time whose intoxicating sovereignty will stand as an impetus to transgress the optical illusion of Mr. Eight-Ball, the unadulterated "I" installed as chimera and despot.
"I want to reach the Western Lands - right in front of you, across the bubbling brook. It's a frozen sewer. All the filth and horror, fear, hate, disease and death of human history flows between you and the Western Lands. Let it flow! How long does it take a man to learn that he does not, cannot want what he "wants." You have to be in Hell to see Heaven. Glimpses from the Land of the Dead, flashes of serene timeless joy, a joy as old as suffering and despair."(257-258)
William Burroughs.
The Western Lands.
Oh my fucking god.
Way way better than that Naked Lunch silliness.
His last book and magnum opus... very very mind expanding, in a way of explaining in a pithy down to earth manner whole other ways of viewing understanding and handling the spacetime continuum and our human experience within it. Some of the language is just spectacular.
Look it up on Amazon.
Actually it is a trilogy... reading first two does deepen The Western Lands, but there is enough in the latter that you can read it by itself. But do try to read all 3. If it becomes not to your liking, scrap the first two and jump right to The Western Lands. The page just explodes with asonishingly original teaching thoughts and images... makes you think "Burroughs was a truly wise and brilliant man".
The reviewer quoted below mentions a great sadness, but I also felt a brilliant scintillating joy and hope for the POSSIBILITIES that the very miraculous existence of mind implies, which trumps and transcends all and and all depressing contents of our specific individual lives. He shows you ways of looking at all this that you will be VERY GRATEFUL to have been granted by the author.
"Product Description
Burroughs's eagerly awaited final novel in the trilogy begun with Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads is a profound, revealing, and often astonishing meditation on mortality, loneliness, nuclear peril, and the inextinguishable hope for life after death."
Burroughs's best work. Period., July 17, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: The Western Lands (Paperback)
The Western Lands has all the scatter-brained and scatological charm that any of WSB's finest portrays, but not only is this particular story, the third installment of the Cities of the Red Night trilogy, form at its best, the content transcends anything else he's written. In his old age, WSB had an incredible emotional sadness about him, and this novel, which becomes semi-autobiographical at its end, leaves you profoundly touched in a way Naked Lunch never did and few novels ever can. The whole thing is worth reading if nothing else for the Wishing Box chapter at the work's conclusion.
"From Publishers Weekly
The trilogy that began with Cities of the Red Night and continued with The Place of Dead Roads is completed here, and the result is a divine comedy," wrote PW of this "remarkable achievement," concerning the search for eternal rest that is symbolized by the Western Lands of Egyptian mythology. "
"From Library Journal
This novel concludes the trilogy begun in Cities of the Red Night ( LJ 11/15/80) and The Place of the Dead Roads ( LJ 2/1/84). The title refers to the place in ancient Egyptian mythology where souls journeyed in search of immortality. Characters from Burroughs's earlier works reappear; the dreamlike prosestylistically a mixture of straight-forward and surrealistic narrative, with sparse use of the cut-up method Burroughs developed with the late Brion Gysinabounds with images of violent homosexuality, man-eating insects, and rancid decay as Burroughs explores such themes as addiction, mortality, the survival of the species, and the quest for eternal life. Essential for all serious literature collections. William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY"
By In One Ear Out Your Mother (Spotswood, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Western Lands (Paperback)
Refusing to designate the human as a unitary enitity, Burroughs compels us to schizophrenize our psychic lives via the Egyptian inspiration that we have Seven Souls, representing the miscellany of psychic forces which vie for possession of the egoistic "I" (in the novel, Mr. Eight-Ball). *Quien es?* [Who's there?] "There is intrigue among the souls, and treachery. No worse fate can befall a man than to be surrounded by traitor souls"(6). Once the reader has mastered this logic of multiplicity, he is ready for Burroughs's second novelistic reality-engine, his attempt to write a new Book of the Dead, an effort to alert the reader of his/her submissive, zombie-like role in the interstices of turn-of-the-century capitalist subjectivity, to grant us the psychic weapons to wage war on the necromantic cultural artifacts which surround us and construct us; a quest to reposition oneself in disjunction with these seven spirits of control and subjugation. The paradise of the Western Lands can only be viewed from the sunken regions of the Land of the Dead, the *kenoma* or cosmological emptiness within which we wander. Those readers who can survive the brutal exigencies of the pilgrim's death-march will realize with Burroughs that Immortality is, in all finality, coextensive with Purpose and Function, a becoming-Active which precedes the constitution of the ego and will survive that ego's demise. The Western Lands will always exist as that unreachable horizon of eternal sanctity and gratification, a Lie against time whose intoxicating sovereignty will stand as an impetus to transgress the optical illusion of Mr. Eight-Ball, the unadulterated "I" installed as chimera and despot.
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Dreamatone
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Has anyone mentioned Pihkal or Tihkal yet? (probably )
)